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This gets a laugh out of John.

“Yes, that’s true. But someone should inform them of the government’s plans.”

“If they don’t already know, they’ll know soon enough.”

“It would be very simple to go in and talk with him.”

“Inside in that squalor? Why, I’ll just bet you anything that place is acrawl with black widows. They say these ‘dobe shacks always house a regular civilization in the walls between the sods. And hot, lord-a-mercy, I hope to tell you. I’ll wager it’s a regular oven in there. Look, look how overdone little Hiawatha is here. Ho. Burnt to a fair turn, he is.”

He laughs and dabs at his head and when the woman looks at him he stops laughing. He clears his throat and spits into the dust and then walks over and sits down in the swing Papa built for me in the juniper tree, and sits there swinging back and forth a little bit and fanning himself with his Stetson.

What he said makes me madder the more I think about it. He and John go ahead talking about our house and village and property and what they are worth, and I get the notion they’re talking about these things around me because they don’t know I speak English. They are probably from the East someplace, where people don’t know anything about Indians but what they see in the movies. I think how ashamed they’re going to be when they find out I know what they are saying.

I let them say another thing or two about the heat and the house; then I stand up and tell the fat man, in my very best schoolbook language, that our sod house is likely to be cooler than any one of the houses in town, lots cooler! “I know for a fact that it’s cooler’n that school I go to and even cooler’n that movie house in The Dalles that advertises on that sign drawn with icicle letters that it’s ‘cool inside’!”

And I’m just about to go and tell them, how, if they’ll come on in, I’ll go get Papa from the scaffolds on the falls, when I see that they don’t look like they’d heard me talk at all. They aren’t even looking at me. The fat man is swinging back and forth, looking off down the ridge of lava to where the men are standing their places on the scaffolding in the falls, just plaidshirted shapes in the mist from this distance. Every so often you can see somebody shoot out an arm and take a step forward like a swordfighter, and then hold up his fifteen-foot forked spear for somebody on the scaffold above him to pull off the flopping salmon. The fat guy watches the men standing in their places in the fifty-foot veil of water, and bats his eyes and grunts every time one of them makes a lunge for a salmon.

The other two, John and the woman, are just standing. Not a one of the three acts like they heard a thing I said; in fact they’re all looking off from me like they’d as soon I wasn’t there at all.

And everything stops and hangs this way for a minute.

I get the funniest feeling that the sun is turned up brighter than before on the three of them. Everything else looks like it usually does—the chickens fussing around in the grass on top of the ‘dobe houses, the grasshoppers batting from bush to bush, the flies being stirred into black clouds around the fish racks by the little kids with sage flails, just like every other summer day. Except the sun, on these three strangers, is all of a sudden way the hell brighter than usual and I can see the... seams where they’re put together. And, almost, see the apparatus inside them take the words I just said and try to fit the words in here and there, this place and that, and when they find the words don’t have any place ready-made where they’ll fit, the machinery disposes of the words like they weren’t even spoken.

The three are stock still while this goes on. Even the swing’s stopped, nailed out at a slant by the sun, with the fat man petrified in it like a rubber doll. Then Papa’s guinea hen wakes up in the juniper branches and sees we got strangers on the premises and goes to barking at them like a dog, and the spell breaks.

The fat man hollers and jumps out of the swing and sidles away through the dust, holding his hat up in front of the sun so’s he can see what’s up there in the juniper tree making such a racket. When he sees it’s nothing but a speckled chicken he spits on the ground and puts his hat on.

“I, myself, sincerely feel,” he says, “that whatever offer we make on this... metropolis will be quite sufficient.”

“Could be. I still think we should make some effort to speak with the Chief—”

The old woman interrupts him by taking one ringing step forward. “No.” This is the first thing she’s said. “No,” she says again in a way that reminds me of the Big Nurse. She lifts her eyebrows and looks the place over. Her eyes spring up like the numbers in a cash register; she’s looking at Mamma’s dresses hung so careful on the line, and she’s nodding her head.

“No. We don’t talk with the Chief today. Not yet. I think. that I agree with Brickenridge for once. Only for a different reason. You recall the record we have shows the wife is not Indian but white? White. A woman from town. Her name is Bromden. He took her name, not she his. Oh, yes, I think if we just leave now and go back into town, and, of course, spread the word with the townspeople about the government’s plans so they understand the advantages of having a hydroelectric dam and a lake instead of a cluster of shacks beside a falls, then type up an offer—and mail it to the wife, you see, by mistake? I feel our job will be a great deal easier.”

She looks off to the men on the ancient, rickety, zigzagging scaffolding that has been growing and branching out among the rocks of the falls for hundreds of years.

“Whereas if we meet now with the husband and make some abrupt offer, we may run up against an un told amount of Navaho stubbornness and love of—I suppose we must call it home.”

I start to tell them he’s not Navaho, but think what’s the use if they don’t listen? They don’t care what tribe he is.

The woman smiles and nods at both the men, a smile and a nod to each, and her eyes ring them up, and she begins to move stiffly back to their car, talking in a light, young voice.

“As my sociology professor used to emphasize, ‘There is generally one person in every situation you must never underestimate the power of.’ ”

And they get back in the car and drive away, with me standing there wondering if they ever even saw me.

 

I was kind of amazed that I’d remembered that. It was the first time in what seemed to me centuries that I’d been able to remember much about my childhood. It fascinated me to discover I could still do it. I lay in bed awake, remembering other happenings, and just about that time, while I was half in a kind of dream, I heard a sound under my bed like a mouse with a walnut. I leaned over the edge of the bed and saw the shine of metal biting off pieces of gum I knew by heart. The black boy named Geever had found where I’d been hiding my chewing gum; was scraping the pieces off into a sack with a long, lean pair of scissors open like jaws.

I jerked back up under the covers before he saw me looking. My heart was banging in my ears, scared he’d seen me. I wanted to tell him to get away, to mind his own business and leave my chewing gum alone, but I couldn’t even let on I heard. I lay still to see if he’d caught me bending over to peek under the bed at him, but he didn’t give any sign—all I heard was the zzzth-zzzth of his scissors and pieces falling into the sack, reminded me of hailstones the way they used to rattle on our tar-paper roof. He clacked his tongue and giggled to himself.

“Um-ummm. Lord Bawd amighty. Hee. I wonder how many times this muthuh chewed some o’ this stuff? Just as hard.”

McMurphy heard the black boy muttering to himself and woke and rolled up to one elbow to look at what he was up to at this hour down on his knees under my bed. He watched the black boy a minute, rubbing his eyes to be sure of what he was seeing, just like you see little kids rub their eyes; then he sat up completely.

“I will be a sonofabitch if he ain’t in here at eleven-thirty at night, fartin’ around in the dark with a pair of scissors and a paper sack.” The black boy jumped and swung his flashlight up in McMurphy’s eyes. “Now tell me, Sam: what the devil are you collectin’ that needs the cover of night?”

“Go back to sleep, McMurphy. It don’t concern nobody else.”

McMurphy let his lips spread in a slow grin, but he didn’t look away from the light. The black boy got uneasy after about half a minute of shining that light on McMurphy sitting there, on that glossy new-healed scar and those teeth and that tattooed panther on his shoulder, and took the light away. He bent back to his work, grunting and puffing like it was a mighty effort prying off dried gum.

“One of the duties of a night aide,” he explained between grunts, trying to sound friendly, “is to keep the bedside area cleaned up.”

“In the dead of night?”

“McMurphy, we got a thing posted called a Job Description, say cleanliness is a twenty-fo’-hour job!”

“You might of done your twenty-four hours’ worth before we got in bed, don’t you think, instead of sittin’ out there watching TV till ten-thirty. Does Old Lady Ratched know you boys watch TV most of your shift? What do you reckon she’d do if she found out about that?”

The black boy got up and sat on the edge of my bed. He tapped the flashlight against his teeth, grinning and giggling. The light lit his face up like a black jack o’lantern.

“Well, let me tell you about this gum,” he said and leaned close to McMurphy like an old chum. “You see, for years I been wondering where Chief Bromden got his chewin’ gum—never havin’ any money for the canteen, never havin’ anybody give him a stick that I saw, never askin’ Public Relations—so I watched, and I waited. And look here.” He got back on his knees and lifted the edge of my bedspread and shined the light under. “How ‘bout that? I bet they’s pieces of gum under here been used a thousand times!”

This tickled McMurphy. He went to giggling at what he saw. The black boy held up the sack and rattled it, and they laughed some more about it. The black boy told McMurphy good night and rolled the top of the sack like it was his lunch and went off somewhere to hide it for later.

“Chief?” McMurphy whispered. “I want you to tell me something.” And he started to sing a little song, a hillbilly song, popular a long time ago: “ ‘Oh, does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?’ “

At first I started getting real mad. I thought he was making fun of me like other people had.

“ ‘When you chew it in the morning,’ ” he sang in a whisper, “ ‘will it be too hard to bite?’ ”

But the more I thought about it the funnier it seemed to me. I tried to stop it but I could feel I was about to laugh—not at McMurphy’s singing, but at my own self.

“ ‘This question’s got me goin’, won’t somebody set me right; does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost o-ver niiiite?’ ”

He held out that last note and twiddled it down me like a feather. I couldn’t help but start to chuckle, and this made me scared I’d get to laughing and not be able to stop. But just then McMurphy jumped off his bed and went to rustling through his nightstand, and I hushed. I clenched my teeth, wondering what to do now. It’d been a long time since I’d let anyone hear me do any more than grunt or bellow. I heard him shut the bedstand, and it echoed like a boiler door. I heard him say, “Here,” and something lit on my bed. Little. Just the size of a lizard or a snake...

“Juicy Fruit is the best I can do for you at the moment, Chief. Package I won off Scanlon pitchin’ pennies.” And he got back in bed.

And before I realized what I was doing, I told him Thank you.

He didn’t say anything right off. He was up on his elbow, watching me the way he’d watched the black boy, waiting for me to say something else. I picked up the package of gum from the bedspread and held it in my hand and told him Thank you.

It didn’t sound like much because my throat was rusty and my tongue creaked. He told me I sounded a little out of practice and laughed at that. I tried to laugh with him, but it was a squawking sound, like a pullet trying to crow. It sounded more like crying than laughing.

He told me not to hurry, that he had till six-thirty in the morning to listen if I wanted to practice. He said a man been still long as me probably had a considerable lot to talk about, and he lay back on his pillow and waited. I thought for a minute for something to say to him, but the only thing that came to my mind was the kind of thing one man can’t say to another because it sounds wrong in words. When he saw I couldn’t say anything he crossed his hands behind his head and started talking himself.

“Ya know, Chief, I was just rememberin’ a time down in the Willamette Valley—I was pickin’ beans outside of Eugene and considering myself damn lucky to get the job. It was in the early thirties so there wasn’t many kids able to get jobs. I got the job by proving to the bean boss I could pick just as fast and clean as any of the adults. Anyway, I was the only kid in the rows. Nobody else around me but grown-ups. And after I tried a time or two to talk to them I saw they weren’t for listening to me—scrawny little patchquilt redhead anyhow. So I hushed. I was so peeved at them not listening to me I kept hushed the livelong four weeks I picked that field, workin’ right along side of them, listening to them prattle on about this uncle or that cousin. Or if somebody didn’t show up for work, gossip about him. Four weeks and not a peep out of me. Till I think by God they forgot I could talk, the mossbacked old bastards. I bided my time. Then, on the last day, I opened up and went to telling them what a petty bunch of farts they were. I told each one just how his buddy had drug him over the coals when he was absent. Hooee, did they listen then! They finally got to arguing with each other and created such a shitstorm I lost my quarter-cent-a-pound bonus I had comin’ for not missin’ a day because I already had a bad reputation around town and the bean boss claimed the disturbance was likely my fault even if he couldn’t prove it. I cussed him out too. My shootin’ off my mouth that time probably cost me twenty dollars or so. Well worth it, too.”

He chuckled a while to himself, remembering, then turned his head on his pillow and looked at me.

“What I was wonderin’, Chief, are you biding your time towards the day you decide to lay into them?”

“No,” I told him. “I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t tell them off? It’s easier than you think.”

“You’re … lot bigger, tougher’n I am,” I mumbled.

“How’s that? I didn’t get you, Chief.”

I worked some spit down in my throat. “You are bigger and tougher than I am. You can do it.”

“Me? Are you kidding? Criminy, look at you: you stand a head taller’n any man on the ward. There ain’t a man here you couldn’t turn every way but loose, and that’s a fact!”

“No. I’m way too little. I used to be big, but not no more. You’re twice the size of me.”

“Hoo boy, you are crazy, aren’t you? The first thing I saw when I came in this place was you sitting over in that chair, big as a damn mountain. I tell you, I lived all over Klamath and Texas and Oklahoma and all over around Gallup, and I swear you’re the biggest Indian I ever saw.”

“I’m from the Columbia Gorge,” I said, and he waited for me to go on. “My Papa was a full Chief and his name was Tee Ah Millatoona. That means The-Pine-That-Stands-Tallest-on-the-Mountain, and we didn’t live on a mountain. He was real big when I was a kid. My mother got twice his size.”

“You must of had a real moose of an old lady. How big was she?”

“Oh—big, big.”

“I mean how many feet and inches?”

“Feet and inches? A guy at the carnival looked her over and says five feet nine and weight a hundred and thirty pounds, but that was because he’d just saw her. She got bigger all the time.’”

“Yeah? How much bigger?”

“Bigger than Papa and me together.”

“Just one day took to growin’, huh? Well, that’s a new one on me: I never heard of an Indian woman doing something like that.”

“She wasn’t Indian. She was a town woman from The Dalles.”

“And her name was what? Bromden? Yeah, I see, wait a minute.” He thinks for a while and says, “And when a town woman marries an Indian that’s marryin’ somebody beneath her, ain’t it? Yeah, I think I see.”

“No. It wasn’t just her that made him little. Everybody worked on him because he was big, and wouldn’t give in, and did like he pleased. Everybody worked on him just the way they’re working on you.”

“They who, Chief?” he asked in a soft voice, suddenly serious.

“The Combine. It worked on him for years. He was big enough to fight it for a while. It wanted us to live in inspected houses. It wanted to take the falls. It was even in the tribe, and they worked on him. In the town they beat him up in the alleys and cut his hair short once. Oh, the Combine’s big—big. He fought it a long time till my mother made him too little to fight any more and he gave up.”

McMurphy didn’t say anything for a long time after that. Then he raised up on his elbow and looked at me again, and asked why they beat him up in the alleys, and I told him that they wanted to make him see what he had in store for him only worse if he didn’t sign the papers giving everything to the government.

“What did they want him to give to the government?”

“Everything. The tribe, the village, the falls...”

“Now I remember; you’re talking about the falls where the Indians used to spear salmon—long time ago. Yeah. But the way I remember it the tribe got paid some huge amount.”

“That’s what they said to him. He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for what a man is? They didn’t understand. Not even the tribe. They stood out in front of our door all holding those checks and they wanted him to tell them what to do now. They kept asking him to invest for them, or tell them where to go, or to buy a farm. But he was too little anymore. And he was too drunk, too. The Combine had whipped him. It beats everybody. It’ll beat you too. They can’t have somebody as big as Papa running around unless he’s one of them. You can see that.”

“Yeah, I reckon I can.”

“That’s why you shouldn’t of broke that window. They see you’re big, now. Now they got to bust you.”

“Like bustin’ a mustang, huh?”

“No. No, listen. They don’t bust you that way; they work on you ways you can’t fight! They put things in! They install things. They start as quick as they see you’re gonna be big and go to working and installing their filthy machinery when you’re little, and keep on and on and on till you’re fixed!”

“Take ‘er easy, buddy; shhh.”

“And if you fight they lock you someplace and make you stop—”

“Easy, easy, Chief. Just cool it for a while. They heard you.” He lay down and kept still. My bed was hot, I noticed. I could hear the squeak of rubber soles as the black boy came in with a flashlight to see what the noise was. We lay still till he left.

“He finally just drank,” I whispered. I didn’t seem to be able to stop talking, not till I finished telling what I thought was all of it. “And the last I see him he’s blind in the cedars from drinking and every time I see him put the bottle to his mouth he don’t suck out of it, it sucks out of him until he’s shrunk so wrinkled and yellow even the dogs don’t know him, and we had to cart him out of the cedars, in a pickup, to a place in Portland, to die. I’m not saying they kill. They didn’t kill him. They did something else.”

I was feeling awfully sleepy. I didn’t want to talk any more. I tried to think back on what I’d been saying, and it didn’t seem like what I’d wanted to say.

“I been talking crazy, ain’t I?”

“Yeah, Chief”—he rolled over in his bed—“you been talkin’ crazy.”

“It wasn’t what I wanted to say. I can’t say it all. It don’t make sense.”

“I didn’t say it didn’t make sense, Chief, I just said it was talkin’ crazy.”

He didn’t say anything after that for so long I thought he’d gone to sleep. I wished I’d told him good night. I looked over at him, and he was turned away from me. His arm wasn’t under the covers, and I could just make out the aces and eights tattooed there. It’s big, I thought, big as my arms used to be when I played football. I wanted to reach over and touch the place where he was tattooed, to see if he was still alive. He’s layin’ awful quiet, I told myself, I ought to touch him to see if he’s still alive....

That’s a lie. I know he’s still alive. That ain’t the reason I want to touch him.

I want to touch him because he’s a man.

That’s a lie too. There’s other men around. I could touch them.

I want to touch him because I’m one of these queers!

But that’s a lie too. That’s one fear hiding behind another. If I was one of these queers I’d want to do other things with him. I just want to touch him because he’s who he is.

But as I was about to reach over to that arm he said, “Say, Chief,” and rolled in bed with a lurch of covers, facing me, “Say, Chief, why don’t you come on this fishin’ trip with us tomorrow?”

I didn’t answer.

“Come on, what do ya say? I look for it to be one hell of an occasion. You know these two aunts of mine comin’ to pick us up? Why, those ain’t aunts, man, no; both those girls are workin’ shimmy dancers and hustlers I know from Portland. What do you say to that?”

I finally told him I was one of the Indigents.

“You’re what?”

“I’m broke.”

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.”

He was quiet for a time again, rubbing that scar on his nose with his finger. The finger stopped. He raised up on his elbow and looked at me.

“Chief,” he said slowly, looking me over, “when you were full-sized, when you used to be, let’s say, six seven or eight and weighed two eighty or so—were you strong enough to, say, lift something the size of that control panel in the tub room?”

I thought about that panel. It probably didn’t weigh a lot more’n oil drums I’d lifted in the Army. I told him I probably could of at one time.

“If you got that big again, could you still lift it?”

I told him I thought so.

“To hell with what you think; I want to know can you promise to lift it if I get you big as you used to be? You promise me that, and you not only get my special body-buildin’ course for nothing but you get yourself a ten-buck fishin’ trip, free!” He licked his lips and lay back. “Get me good odds too, I bet.”

He lay there chuckling over some thought of his own. When I asked him how he was going to get me big again he shushed me with a finger to his lips.

“Man, we can’t let a secret like this out. I didn’t say I’d tell you how, did I? Hoo boy, blowin’ a man back up to full size is a secret you can’t share with everybody, be dangerous in the hands of an enemy. You won’t even know it’s happening most of the time yourself. But I give you my solemn word, you follow my training program, and here’s what’ll happen.”

He swung his legs out of bed and sat on the edge with his hands on his knees. The dim light coming in over his shoulder from the Nurses’ Station caught the shine of his teeth and the one eye glinting down his nose at me. The rollicking auctioneer’s voice spun softly through the dorm.

“ There you’ll be. It’s the Big Chief Bromden, cuttin’ down the boulevard—men, women, and kids rockin’ back on their heels to peer at him: ‘Well well well, what giant’s this here, takin’ ten feet at a step and duckin’ for telephone wires?’ Comes stompin’ through town, stops just long enough for virgins, the rest of you twitches might’s well not even line up ‘less you got tits like muskmelons, nice strong white legs long enough to lock around his mighty back, and a little cup of poozle warm and juicy and sweet as butter an’ honey...”

In the dark there he went on, spinning his tale about how it would be, with all the men scared and all the beautiful young girls panting after me. Then he said he was going out right this very minute and sign my name up as one of his fishing crew. He stood up, got the towel from his bedstand and wrapped it around his hips and put on his cap, and stood over my bed.

“Oh man, I tell you, I tell you, you’ll have women trippin’ you and beatin’ you to the floor.”

And all of a sudden his hand shot out and with a swing of his arm untied my sheet, cleared my bed of covers, and left me lying there naked.

“Look there, Chief. Haw. What’d I tell ya? You growed a half a foot already.”

Laughing, he walked down the row of beds to the hall.

Two whores on their way down from Portland to take us deep-sea fishing in a boat! It made it tough to stay in bed until the dorm lights came on at six-thirty.

I was the first one up out of the dorm to look at the list posted on the board next to the Nurses’ Station, check to see if my name was really signed there. SIGN UP FOR DEEP SEA FISHING was printed in big letters at the top, then McMurphy had signed first and Billy Bibbit was number one, right after McMurphy. Number three was Harding and number four was Fredrickson, and all the way down to number ten where nobody’d signed yet. My name was there, the last put down, across from the number nine. I was actually going out of the hospital with two whores on a fishing boat; I had to keep saying it over and over to myself to believe it.

The three black boys slipped up in front of me and read the list with gray fingers, found my name there and turned to grin at me.

“Why, who you s’pose signed Chief Bromden up for this foolishness? Inniuns ain’t able to write.”

“What makes you think Inniuns able to read?”

The starch was still fresh and stiff enough this early that their arms rustled in the white suits when they moved, like paper wings. I acted deaf to them laughing at me, like I didn’t even know, but when they stuck a broom out for me to do their work up the hall, I turned around and walked back to the dorm, telling myself, The hell with that. A man goin’ fishing with two whores from Portland don’t have to take that crap.

It scared me some, walking off from them like that, because I never went against what the black boys ordered before. I looked back and saw them coming after me with the broom. They’d probably have come right on in the dorm and got me but for McMurphy; he was in there making such a fuss, roaring up and down between the beds, snapping a towel at the guys signed to go this morning, that the black boys decided maybe the dorm wasn’t such safe territory to venture into for no more than somebody to sweep a little dab of hallway.

McMurphy had his motorcycle cap pulled way forward on his red hair to look like a boat captain, and the tattoos showing out from the sleeves of his T-shirt were done in Singapore. He was swaggering around the floor like it was the deck of a ship, whistling in his hand like a bosun’s whistle.

“ Hit the deck, mateys, hit the deck or I keelhaul the lot of ye from stock to stern!”

He rang the bedstand next to Harding’s bed with his knuckles.

“Six bells and all’s well. Steady as she goes. Hit the deck. Drop your cocks and grab your socks.”

He noticed me standing just inside the doorway and came rushing over to thump my back like a drum.

“Look here at the Big Chief; here’s an example of a good sailor and fisherman: up before day and out diggin’ red worms for bait. The rest of you scurvy bunch o’ lubbers’d do well to follow his lead. Hit the deck. Today’s the day! Outa the sack and into the sea!”

The Acutes grumbled and griped at him and his towel, and the Chronics woke up to look around with beads blue from lack of blood cut off by sheets tied too tight across the chest, looking around the dorm till they finally centered on me with weak and watered-down old looks, faces wistful and curious. They lay there watching me pull on warm clothes for the trip, making me feel uneasy and a little guilty. They could sense I had been singled out as the only Chronic making the trip. They watched me—old guys welded in wheelchairs for years, with catheters down their legs like vines rooting them for the rest of their lives right where they are, they watched me and knew instinctively that I was going. And they could still be a little jealous it wasn’t them. They could know because enough of the man in them had been damped out that the old animal instincts had taken over (old Chronics wake up sudden some nights, before anybody else knows a guy’s died in the dorm, and throw back their heads and howl), and they could be jealous because there was enough man left to still remember.

McMurphy went out to look at the list and came back and tried to talk one more Acute into signing, going down the line kicking at the beds still had guys in them with sheets pulled over their heads, telling them what a great thing it was to be out there in the teeth of the gale with a he-man sea crackin’ around and a goddam yo-heave-ho and a bottle of rum. “C’mon, loafers, I need one more mate to round out the crew, I need one more goddam volunteer....”